So Quick The Crocodile Has Eaten The Sun – Boemo Diale
Opening 11 AM | 10 October 2026
kumalo | turpin, Nine Yards, Johannesburg, ZA
An old Tswana description of time imagines each day ending with a crocodile swallowing the sun and releasing the moon. That image has stayed with Boemo Diale for years, and it sits at the heart of her new body of paintings and ceramic vessels. Drawing on Tswana and other indigenous cosmologies, and on maternal knowledge, she builds a private mythology of protection, possibility and hope.
Her familiar world of women, bodies, vessels and symbols remains, but the focus has widened from her own story to time itself and the worlds we build around us.
Reflections - Treasure Mlima
Opening 11 AM | 10 October 2026
kumalo | turpin, Nine Yards, Johannesburg, ZA
Treasure Mlima approaches consciousness as a bodily experience rather than a fixed idea. His work isolates the quiet moments when the body performs, and records the strain that history and colonial structures leave on the self. Drawing on Frantz Fanon's writing on psychological displacement and the internalised white mask, he asks what it takes to name the world and to belong without the exhaustion of spectacle.
Through slow, rhythmic carving, Mlima develops a formal language that values emergence over resolution and improvisation over polish. After a career spent studying the body, he now presents it as evidence: a physical record of internalised performance and institutional conditioning.
kumalo | turpin at 1:54 London, Somerset House
15-18 October 2026
Booth E11, Somerset House, London, UK
We are presenting four artists at our 1:54 booth this year: Boemo Diale, Cameron Platter, Katlego Tlabela, and Nathaniel Sheppard III. We look forward to seeing you there!